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This debate in the frame of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's
Power Cut Middle East programme, takes a look at the images, both moving
and still, that have come from the Middle East like a huge wave in the
past few months. Due to the increase of mobile phone films and photos,
we have a great deal of material whose origin is uncertain. It seems
authentic, but who is coming to blows with whom? And who has made the
films and taken the photos? Regimes are also aware of this, and use it
to their advantage. Are we seeing actors, paid demonstrators, real
people? How do we read and interpret these images?

Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago(1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences,understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media.

At the end of the third 'Next 5 Minutes' conference on tactical media
(March 1999) in Amsterdam, an interesting discussion emerged around the
question of how the minor media practices elaborated and highlighted in
this vibrant event would ever reach a wider audience for lack of being
covered by any mainstream outlet. At one point, some people from the
back of the room (unfortunately I don't know anymore who exactly, I
believe an Italian group), shouted: 'We don't want to be mediated - we
mediate ourselves!'

Presence in the mediated environment of digital networks is probably
one of the most complex phenomena of the new types of social
interaction that have emerged in these environments. In the current
phase of radical deployment (or penetration) of the Internet, various
attempts are being made to come to terms with the social dynamics of
networked communication spaces. It seems that traditional media theory
is not able to contextualise these social dynamics, as it remains stuck
on a meta-level discourse of media and power structures (Virilio),
hyperreality (Baudrillard), or on a retrograde analysis of media
structures deeply rooted in the functionality and structural
characteristics of broadcast media (McLuhan).

"If you've been following events in Syria, you'd know that the
English-language press is mostly deeply critical of the Assad regime
(while the Arabic press displays a slightly wider range of views). I
thought it would be worth trying to present a minority report on the
situation from a Syrian friend of mine, although, as you will see, he
argues precisely that his position is actually held by a very
significant majority (albeit a rather quiet and frustrated majority) of
Syrians.

Camille Otrakji is a Syrian political blogger based in
Montreal. Although he tends to keep a low profile, Otrakji has been, for
the past several years, at the forefront of many of the most
interesting and influential online initiatives relating to Syrian
politics. He is one of the authors and moderators at Joshua Landis's
Syria Comment, and the founder of Creative Syria, a constellation of
websites including Mideast Image (a vast collection of original old
photographs of Middle Eastern subjects) and Syrian Think Tank (an online
debate site hosting many of Syria's top analysts). Last year, Otrakji
courted controversy with a new initiative devoted to the subject of
Syrian-Israeli peace, entitled OneMideast.org. He agreed to speak with
me about the latest events in Syria, and I'm sure that his views will
generate plenty of discussion."

There is an unshakable belief in the idea that what defines the mass
media is that they produce or constitute, in all their different ways,
a public. So while there is agreement on the fact that not every public
sphere is a communication medium, many people tend to think that every
communication medium constitutes a public sphere - the most recent and
prominent candidate being, of course, the Internet. But is this claim
as to the public quality of all media, hegemonic as it may be today,
really tenable?

(Why Theory?) We have to dispense with the idea that theorising occurs
after the creative event; that a poem or a track or a text is made and
then, as part of its process of dissemination, there follows the
theorising of the piece. Such a theorising is normally attributed to
those known variously as critics, reviewers and essayists.